Palm Pre users suffer cloud computing data loss

Palm is investigating why its Palm Pre users are suffering data loss after resetting or replacing their WebOS phones and attempting to restore their personal data from the company's online cloud backup service.

Pre contacts, calendar items, memos and tasks are supposed to be backed up by automatic sync to Palm's cloud servers, enabling users to swap out faulty hardware without any need to back up their data to their own local computer. Palm refers to this online data backup as a Profile, but the system isn't working for an increasing number of users who report losing all or most of their information, according to a report by PreCentral.

The problem recalls the data catastrophe suffered by Microsoft's Danger group, which resulted in a widespread loss of personal information for T-Mobile Sidekick users. Microsoft was able to recover some of the data after Sun and Oracle experts stepped in to help recover the information, but the salvaged data took over a month to restore because the company didn't have adequate backups.

Earlier this year, Nokia also experienced a cloud services failure with Ovi, its mobile online service then operating in a public beta, after a server accident resulted in database problems. Despite having "regular backups," the company said "we were not able to set it right" and had to revert to an older database performed three weeks earlier at its previous hosting center.

"Were sorry for the lost contacts in your phonebooks," Nokia's Ovi Contacts project manager Kristian Luoma posted to the company's blog. "Were sorry that the profile pictures you love, and we love too are gone. Nothing can make this right, we know, but were hoping that you can forgive us and give another chance to give you good service."

Like Microsoft's Danger/Sidekick platform, Palm's new WebOS devices are not designed to sync with a desktop PC, so users can't back up their own phones without buying third party software to do so. Apple has suffered similar data loss issues in its rollout of MobileMe, its own cloud backup and push sync data service, but iPhone and iPod touch users are able to sync their devices to iTunes locally, enabling them to backup and restore their personal data independently of any problems that many occur in the cloud.

The Cloud or Bust

Despite the widespread troubles plaguing devices that are only designed to sync with the cloud (and which make it complicated, difficult or even impossible for users to perform their own backups locally), vendors are still working to push mobile devices tied to cloud-only sync services.

Last year, Android's Product Marketing Director Marc Vanlerberghe, wrote, "We envisioned a world where your various computers and phones would always be in sync without needing discipline, USB cables, Bluetooth, and synchronization software." The result was that Google's Android is designed to sync user data automatically to Google's cloud service in the background.

If Google were to lose any Android data on its end (Google's Gmail and other services have gone offline and/or lost users' messages several times before) Android phones would dutifully sync the loss back to the handset without the user even realizing it happened until the data was gone, with no way for the user to subsequently restore the data.

Microsoft recently released its own My Phone service for Windows Mobile to similarly back up users' entire phone to the company's cloud servers rather than to the their own PC. Most Windows Mobile phones are designed to sync with a local Exchange Server, which many of Microsoft's remaining users might prefer over the company's own cloud service, given its track record with Danger.

Unlike the iPhone 3GS, the Verizon/Motorola Droid doesn't support the default minimum security policy required by Exchange Server, resulting in many companies refusing to support Android phone sync with their corporate email systems.

With every major phone vendor having experienced serious and significant cloud service failures, more companies might begin recognizing that support for local data sync and backup through a user application like iTunes is not just a good idea, but an essential feature for consumers increasingly wary of trusting their information to a central server on the cloud, particularly services that offer to maintain users' data for free, and which subsequently can't be expected to care that much about restoring lost information once it occurs.

I don't see how anybody thinks cloud-only computing is a good idea. I love syncing through the cloud with my iPhone and MobileMe, but when something goes wrong on the cloud, I still have two or more local copies I can refer to, and if those got destroyed by the corrupted data from the cloud, I have backups of my local system because I'm a responsible computer user.

The idea that the only copy of your data is on somebody else's servers, in a format of their chosing, that you can only reach when you have internet access, is scary as hell. It might be useful for some things -- if Facebook crashed and burned and disappeared from existence overnight, I wouldn't cry. But we're talking about email, phone numbers, addresses, calendars, identification and banking data, application data -- the things that have become essential to our productivity and survival as a technological civilization. What person, that determines the course of a major company like Microsoft or Google, thinks that keeping everyone's data only on the cloud is a safe idea, to the point where they make it impossible or impractical for a person to have a local backup?

It's not just Palm. Apple had issues when they launched MobileMe, Microsoft had it recently. GMail was offline and had a scare just a few weeks ago.

They need to get this right or nobody's gonna trust having their info stored in the Cloud and not locally. As a photographer, there's no way I'd trust my life's work to be somewhere in the ether. I keep a copy on my Mac, a copy on my Time Capsule and a copy in on an HDD stored in a safety deposit box at my bank.

I had a recent experience where a software install hosed my address book. I was able to quickly restore from the "cloud" (google address book) but also had a local backup as well. The cloud was quicker in this instance but having one or many local backups is always a smart way to go.

For me, the cloud as a backup to my local backup won't be changing anytime soon.

When a plane crashes there are news stories around the world. But every single day many more people are killed on the roads. They just don't make the headlines.

Cloud computing failures can be similarly high profile events. However, the reality is that most people do not back up local data and many more people have lost documents or contacts because of a HDD failure or their phone died than have lost data due to cloud computing failures.

The more duplication of data across more locations (local + remote) the less likely you are suffer data loss; however for the average consumer, just moving to the cloud would put them in a better position than they are now.